Format: In Print and Online

Now that the explosive growth of the dot-com industry has abated, many are wondering if the same fate awaits electronic publishing. At the annual Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, where a sober crowd gathered in October 2001, just weeks after the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the Pollyannaish predictions of recent years about e-books were replaced by a more uncertain tone.

So how did John Dufresne—the eldest of four children of French-Canadian parents, a boy who grew up in the Catholic, blue-collar Grafton Hill neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts, a boy for whom it was beyond imagining that a man might find his vocation in words—become a noted short story writer, a sought-after teacher of creative writing, and the author of three acclaimed novels, two of which are set well below the Mason-Dixon line? In part, the answer is a keen ear for the music of language and an eye for the telling detail.

In honor of poet Robert Bly's 75th birthday last month, the Minneapolis-based Loft Literary Center, in conjunction with the McKnight Foundation, revived Bly's innovative literary magazine—originally titled The Fifties, in honor of the decade in which it was founded—by publishing the first issue of The Thousands.

The Academy of American Poets, the 68-year-old literary nonprofit, has made headlines recently, but not for its latest party or prizewinner. In September the organization, best known for founding National Poetry Month, announced that Executive Director William Wadsworth had been asked to resign by board of directors president Henry Reath. And on November 7, the board voted to lay off eight of the Academy's seventeen employees and to subdivide its new office and rent out half of the space, which the group had renovated and moved into in August.